Introduction

This project grew out of the frustration that our users often felt when using the Library of American Civilization microfiche cards owned by our library. While the titles add depth to our holdings in 19th century American works, the cards could only be read on one machine in our library, and the quality was often poor at best. One day it occurred to me to hire a student to check the list of LAC holdings in our opac against the list of online titles maintained by the University of Pennsylvania. We found hundreds of hits. We added links to those records in our catalog and then posted the information to this file. The process was repeated each year, and we continue to add about 50 titles per year, until January 2007 when we discovered that the Google Books project was adding massive numbers of these titles. We found that the number of linked LACs had grown from the 420 we had identified over the years to more than 1000 in less than 5 months. After an initial surge, the number of these in Google slowed down to a steady increase in 2008.